Americans prefer Miley to Syria stories by huge number

(USA Today) -- You probably already sensed that media coverage of Miley Cyrus' shenanigans would be more popular with Americans than stories about mass murder in Syria and the possible U.S. intervention there.

But someone has actually calculated exactly how much more popular Miley is than Syria: 12 times more popular. It's another one of those signs that suggests...well, something about the state of our culture.

A new survey by Outbrain, a leading "content discovery platform" on the Web, tracked traffic data from its network of 100,000 publishers and major news organizations and found that Americans viewed 12 times as many pages about Miley-the-twerker as they did about Syria-the-damned. New York magazine's popular fashion blog, The Cut, summed it up.

This disparity is in spite of the fact that hundreds of Syrians, including more than 400 kids, were recently gassed to death, apparently by their own government, and despite the fact that more than twice as many news stories about Syria have been published for every one about Miley in recent days.

The interesting bit about the data is that this disparity was the greatest in the USA, where President Obama is now in an uphill battle to persuade Congress and the American public to back his plan to bomb Syria and its stores of chemical weapons.

Miley interest, white-hot since her salacious twerk-fest on the Video Music Awards last month, significantly outpaces Syria interest in other countries, too, such as Australia, Britain, France and Germany.

In fact, Miley trumps Syria in every other country in the Outbrain network except Syria-supporter Russia, where interest was about even, and Israel, where next-door-neighbor Syria commands more attention for obvious reasons.

With Obama due to address the nation on Tuesday, Syria isn't leaving the headlines soon. But Miley continues to get coverage today, too. She appears nude in her latest video, and reports surfaced that her dirty-dancing habits may have caused Vogue to cancel her as a cover girl for the December issue.

Win some, lose some, but at least everyone is still talking about her.